Thursday, 2 December 2010

US companies get rid of WikiLeaks

Today Amazon announced that is no longer hosting WikiLeaks.org. Wikileaks has been pulled after political pressure from US politicians, especially Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security.

To be honest I'm not surprised. I was surprised when WikiLeaks.org decided to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for hosting WikiLeaks documents and other content. Upcoming Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act as well recent seizures of the domain names by DHS prove, FEDs and US politicians will do everything to force US based companies to stop hosting illegal content (of course the question is if the content is illegal; in the USA, diplomatic cables are illegal; in the contrary, in all other countries, US cables are not "SECRET" and not subject to the local law).

As Liberman said, Amazon's decision "should set the standard for other companies WikiLeaks is using to distribute its illegally seized material. I call on any other company or organisation that is hosting WikiLeaks to immediately terminate its relationship with them."

The question is why Julian Assange decided to use Amazon.com. In my opinion the contract with Amazon (big, US based company) was signed with the expectation to be soon... terminated by Amazon (as it finally happened). For everybody it was clear that Amazon just can't host it, so why has he done it? Today, Julian Assange can show to the media that US is chasing and mistreating him with unfair methods to get him out of business.

Has it been done just for PR? I bet "yes". We have even more examples. Assange decided to publish just a fraction of the documents and is "leaking" next cables one by one. Why? It's a standard PR activity to keep someone on the front pages for a long period of time.

Regardless of you think about WikiLeaks, next time you read about WikiLeaks think about Marketing and PR side of it...